Cole
Series: The Suicide of Petronius (December 2018) and Dual Self Portrait: My Mind and the Universe (June 2019)
Pen on Paper
21 x 30 cm
Inspired by Wols, I build up shapes into a web, paralleling the cosmos and neural networks. The picture, united from afar, conceals tiny images within its fabric. Thus the viewer, forced to uncover these images through zoomed attention, experiences depth. The work’s process is inspired by writers Ginsberg and Kerouac, who wrote spontaneously to map an evolving consciousness as different ideas accumulate to become something: “mind practised in spontaneity invents form in its own image”.
Insect Expedition (February 2020)
Charcoal on paper
50 x 17 cm
In this piece, I use the surrealist technique of automatic drawing to manifest a span of mind-action, hoping to let breathe the subconscious. With dynamic curves and lines, an angular composition, and forms drawn from those of the natural world, the piece is a probe into the channeling of life-force into and out of spontaneous, organic growth. The forms evoke rash movement, representing the flow of my impulses growing as freely as things like trees and bones come into being.
Symbiosis (March 2020)
Charcoal on paper
Dimensions
With elements inspired by both cathedral and Satanic imagery, I hoped to visualize the understanding that many religions rest upon, that the forces of good and bad, growth and destruction, life and death, ebb and flow, are in opposition only as part of a larger natural harmony, in which, according to Lao Tse, all “arises mutually”. I show this union through near symmetry, but I use spontaneous drawing to preserve a sense of chaotic, imperfect organic motion. This motion indicates life force.
John Coltrane (March 2020)
Pencil on paper
15 x 15 cm
This drawing commemorates John Coltrane. The profile view inside a circle has been used since the Renaissance to evoke ancient coins; here it exalts Coltrane with the air of a Roman Emperor. The austere drawing style, developed from the Charles Bargue plates, adds to this classical dignity. I have kept out the saxophone, but intimated its presence through puffed cheeks and pursed lips, suggesting that Coltrane’s chief glory, his power to make music, is only a result of a great human character.
Series: Moonlight (November 2018)
Chalk on black paper
128 x 60 cm
Moonlight is a series of drawings of three different sections of the body. I drew them from a living model. It is an appreciation of beauty. The smooth rendering in white chalk mimics the effect of the moon’s calming light, making the drawings stand out in a bright and isolated way against the dark. The piece’s sense of balance comes from the unity of the three separate panels, despite their different subjects.
Fold Study: Trash Bag (October 2018)
Graphite on paper
58 x 38 cm
This piece shows the human gaze at work. At a certain angle, a regular trash bag becomes a dynamic abstract piece. While the work’s strong diagonals give it a sense of movement, its balanced composition and smooth rendering—inspired by the Charles Bargue plates and San Francisco artist Joel Daniel Phillips—temper that dynamism with stability. This is a stepping stone for technique, because better control of the pencil will help me draw anything better.
Distortion of Bronzino’s Lodovico Capponi (March 2020)
Oil paint on panel
21 x 29 cm
I made this piece in order to raise my skill level in painting, through experiment. It is a distortion of a work by Bronzino: I aimed to learn by imitating an old master, but also to tweak the piece according to my own feeling. In exaggerating the figure’s proportions, which I use to create a skewed composition, I am pushing the key principles of mannerism to an extreme. Therefore I double the movement’s innovations upon themselves. The effect is one of delirium and unease.
Memento Mori (May 2019)
Acrylic paint on canvas
150 x 121 cm
Memento Mori is a self-portrait and a reminder of death, using shock to stimulate the viewer’s zeal for living. The discomfort is achieved by contrasts of stability and agitated movement: the pyramid composition vs the texture; the supernatural reds of the body vs. the blunt, browned intestines; the relaxed pose vs the stiff shoulders + Renaissance perspective. Inspired by Rembrandt, I increase texture in the face and guts in order to draw the viewer’s focus: life ends when your body does.
Hesitation/Hamlet (February 2020)
Acrylic paint on wood
140 x 140 cm
Hesitation stops the flow of nature. There is a nausea that swells in you when you see all the paths to take and want to go down all of them but do not. Here, slashes of paint evoke a swirling movement, and the color palette, taken from Richard Diebenkorn, is full with contrast. But the circle’s edge stops all this force, so that the movement, instead of rushing out, bulges up and grows bloated, and the colors get muddled and “sicklied” over with green. I achieved this with acrylic glaze medium.
I Am Here (March 2020)
Acrylic on Wood
130 x 98 cm
I Am Here is about the feeling of awe that overcomes you when you confront great beauty and great scale, and try to comprehend ALL that is here, flowing, moving, brimming with energy and substance right now—you feel that you are nothing. I intend to represent, through the motif of vision, the concept of the sublime: that the mind, because it surrounds the greatness it sees, is greater than it all. So I exist? In one moment the seer and the seen disintegrate and join in infinity (white space).
Portrait of Ayden Over Ten Seconds (December 2019)
iPhone Photograph
26 x 21 cm
Somewhat linked to ideas in cubism, this photo represents the way that seconds and longer spans of time seem to me to pass. As, from moment to moment, what was there before disappears, and then what is here now disappears, the way we see life and people gets broken into splintered fragments. Using the panorama tool, I show how personal intensity can still show through in cut-up versions of ourselves. Although the figure is obscured over time, a strong sense of motion and life still escapes.